Our massive purpose is to be known for supporting everyone with a neuromuscular condition in WA, who need us.

At the very end of 2022, as we were embarking on our strategic planning for 2023, an idea was tabled about changing our name to help achieve this. Our data show that 43% of the community we provide support to are actually people with a condition that is not muscular dystrophy. Whilst our service provision has included all neuromuscular conditions for quite some time, our name hadn’t caught up so to align with our vision going forward, we renamed to Neuromuscular WA.

This decision followed much consideration and input from a cross-section of our stakeholders to ensure interest and support, including our founder, Prof Byron Kakulas before he sadly passed. Prof was incredibly supportive of this change and the greater access it would provide for new community members to reach us.

We also received some feedback out of our system navigation pilot project which suggested that we may struggle to have people referred to us based on our name being so specific to muscular dystrophy and that those searching for support on their own may not know to get in touch.

As with all that we do, gaining input from our stakeholders is important to us so we chose several long-term community members, supporters and professionals in our field and put forward our proposal to change our name to gather their feedback.

Some of the consultation questions we posed to our chosen stakeholders included:
• Do you think there could be any negative implications with the name change?
• Are there any obstacles you think we might face along the way when we communicate the change with others?
• Would it change how you feel about our organisation and how engaged you might be going forward?

We received unaninmous support in the change and it was approved by our membership via Special Resolution at the Special General Meeting held on February 1, 2023.

A special thanks to those who provided their invaluable feedback during the rebrand consultations.

You can see our name change certificate here.